A good association rule set never fails to impress me. I love the hypothetical made concrete, the hunch turned into fact – attributes become relationships, numbers become involvement between tuples, fields, and tables. All in all, we live in interesting times, and making sense of all of this allows us as people to continue achieving, pushing ahead. Up, up, and beyond.

Here is an Association Graph image made with RapidMiner that shows associations between various social groups in a community. While the data is/was (probably) fictitious, the connections are plausible and viable. These associations are the type of causal relationship that humans identify easily, but machines used to have a difficult time identifying. Given this, I would offer a maxim: The truth is in the algorithm.